Summary: define the metadata of your project in a single place, then make it available at setup-time and at runtime.
Let's consider the about package as an example ; we add to our project
files, in the source tree, a file named about.py that contains the metadata
of the project:
about
|--- setup.py
|--- README.md
|...
|--- about
| |--- __init__.py
| |...
| |--- about.py
This file contains the metadata (and a little boilerplate):
# coding: utf-8
metadata = dict(
__name__ = "about",
__version__ = "5.1.1",
__license__ = "MIT License",
__author__ = u"Sébastien Boisgérault <Sebastien.Boisgerault@gmail.com>",
__url__ = "https://warehouse.python.org/project/about",
__summary__ = "Software Metadata for Humans",
__keywords__ = "Python / 2.7, OS independent, software development"
)
globals().update(metadata)
__all__ = metadata.keys()
Setup. To use this metadata, the setup.py file includes the code:
import about
import about.about
info = about.get_metadata(about.about)
# add extra information (contents, requirements, etc.).
info.update(...)
if __name__ == "__main__":
setuptools.setup(**info)
Runtime. The metadata is stored as a collection of attributes of the
about.about module. If we include in the about/__init__.py file the
one-liner
from .about import *
they become available in the top-level module:
>>> import about
>>> print about.__name__
about
>>> print about.__version__
5.1.1
>>> print about.__license__
MIT License